Mozilla Pulling Out of Thunderbird Email Project

Mozilla on Monday is expected to announce that it's no longer going to develop its popular Thunderbird email client, leaving such chores to the open source community at large. News of Mozilla's decision came to light when a confidential letter sent out to "Mozillians" was leaked to the Web for all to see.

"We’ve been focusing efforts towards important Web and mobile projects, such as B2G, while Thunderbird remains a pure desktop-only email client. We have come to the conclusion that continued innovation on Thunderbird is not the best use of our resources given our ambitious organizational goals," Mozilla said in an email.

Mozilla went on to clarify that it's not 'stopping' Thunderbird, per se, "but proposing we adapt the Thunderbird release and governance model in a way that allows both ongoing security and stability maintenance, as well as community-driven innovation and development for the product."

Thunderbird has been a popular Outlook alternative ever since it was released nine years ago this month.